I. Field of Invention
The invention generally relates to wireless communication systems, and more particularly to wireless communication systems employing multi-beam satellites and having built-in redundancy.
II. Description of the Related Art
A satellite receives a signal from a transmitter at one location and forwards the signal to a receiver at some other location. By “bouncing” signals off satellites, satellite systems can provide communications virtually anywhere. Satellite systems can also be comparatively inexpensive because very little land-based infrastructure, such as, for example, telephone lines and cellular towers, is needed to cover very large areas and/or very long distances. These advantages make satellite systems ideal for a wide variety of applications, including high speed data communications and/or wireless broadband access.
However, a number of challenges still need to be overcome to provide a more efficient and reliable satellite based data communication service. First of all, while it is possible for a single multi-beam satellite in a geostationary orbit to cover a service area the size of a large country, a relatively large number of beams, in the range of several tens to a few hundred, would be required to achieve a desired communication link capacity. These beams form tightly-packed “cell” patterns to cover the service area to service a large number of users. Such an approach creates inter-beam interference problems affecting the overall efficiency of the system. Such interference needs to be kept to an absolute minimum. Therefore, there is a need to address the inter-beam interference problems to provide a more efficient system.